Tracking the Trends: AI, WebRTC, Crypto, and Full Stack Startups

Today’s episode is a conversation about four big trends in the tech world. Any one of these trends would be notable on its own, but we cover all four in this hallway-style chat, as a16z General Partner Chris Dixon talks with Sep Kamvar (professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and now cofounder of cryptocurrency platform Celo); and Elad Gil (investor and the cofounder of health technology company Color Genomics, and formerly at Twitter and Google). This is a wide-ranging survey of some of the major shifts in technology right now, but it’s really a meta-story of how innovation happens, which is most definitely not in a straight line. So here are the trends they cover: *crypto; *AI and machine learning (including GPT-3); *full stack startups (which Chris first wrote about in 2014); *and collaborative web/collaborative enterprise/social (including RTC or real-time communication within the browser), which is where the conversation begins.